At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Public Cloud, the company's first big IaaS foray into applications, middleware, and (of course) database solutions delivered as a service.

Matthew Weinberger

October 12, 2012

3 Min Read
Oracle Public Cloud: Is Larry Ellison Innovating?

larry-ellison

At Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Public Cloud, the company’s first big IaaS foray into applications, middleware, and (of course) database solutions delivered as a service. In my opinion Oracle Public Cloud looks a lot like Salesforce.com — which may explain some of the fireworks between Ellison and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff this week.

Let’s back up. As per the Oracle blog entry that details the offering, there are five key components to the Oracle Public Cloud suite:

Application Services

  • Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service

  • Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Service

  • Oracle Social Network Cloud Service

Platform Services

  • Oracle Database Cloud Service

  • Oracle Java Cloud Service

Among those five key components are 100 “modules,” providing for everything from compliance and governance to financial management to supply chain management and back. In other words, Oracle Public Cloud aims to take all of Ellison and company’s existing expertise and experience from decades in the enterprise IT world and make it into a compelling cloud play.

Also of note: Throughout Oracle OpenWorld, the company said its on-premise applications and cloud applications would leverage the exact same code. Ellison’s goal is to allow Oracle customers to mix and match their on-premise deployments with cloud offerings.

Predictably, Oracle Public Cloud is all built on the Fusion Applications platform, a project six years in the making, with baked-in BI/analytics, security, portability between legacy and cloud environments, service-oriented architecture, and the use of industry standards all given as key priorities.

Speaking of industry standards, Oracle Public Cloud unsurprisingly allows for applications to be built or extended into the cloud by way of common standards like Java EE and SQL, bringing it onto a par with many other public cloud providers and ensuring portability between them and on-premises applications.

Ellison singled out Oracle Public Cloud’s standards-based infrastructure and pursuant ease of data migration as a major edge over competitors like — you guessed it — Salesforce.com.

And naturally, the Oracle Public Cloud applications are designed to work in most mobile browsers – though I didn’t realize until it was pointed out that Ellison didn’t mention Google Android on stage. What’s more, Exalogic and Exadata are at the core of the Oracle Public Cloud offering, proving that TalkinCloud was correct in our hunch that the two platforms were destined for new life in the cloud.

Otherwise, Oracle is pitching the solution with all the usual cloud perks: predictable billing, scalability, self-service, and so forth.

I’m of two minds here:

  • Oracle is the arms dealer of the cloud space, as my editor Joe Panettieri likes to say, and there are many, many SaaS providers out there who run Oracle databases and are looking for a compatible cloud solution. What’s more, the vast majority of public clouds already use Oracle databases and middleware behind the scenes, so even if this is Oracle’s first public IaaS play, it’s way more ingratiated with the cloud services channel than it may appear at first blush.

  • But on the other hand, by taking the time to make so many slams on Salesforce.com on stage, and by allegedly barring Benioff from speaking at OpenWorld, and by taking so long to come out with this solution, Oracle looks like they envy Salesforce at a time when they need to energize their user base by appearing to be thought leaders and visionaries.

Needless to say, we’ll be watching Oracle Public Cloud under the microscope, so stay tuned.

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Matthew Weinberger

Matthew Weinberger

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